Facial recognition is going to be crucial to being able to search, organize, and discover photos online. One promising startup tackling this problem is Face.com, which launched in private beta 30 days ago as a Facebook application. It scours all your photos and all the photos of your friends using existing tags to train the system. Then it tries to automatically recognize and tag the same faces in other photos.
In 30 days, Face.com has scanned 400 million photos and identified 700,000 different people. All of these are from an initial group of a few thousand beta testers. It is still in private beta, but here are 100 invites to check it out.
The app works surprisingly well, although there are the occasional comic false positives, like the clown picture above that it is 47 percent sure is MG, one of our writers. Wait a second. That isn’t you in the clown outfit, is it, MG?
